Friday, 11 October 2013

Testing my SharePoint 2013 Network Load Balancer

Overview: This is how I tested my Kemp load balancer. Kemp terminates the SSL and has a load balancer that checks the http service is running. I still like to use session persistence for load balancing.

Fiddler is useful from the client, you can check that SSL is getting correctly written by the Load Balanacer. Microsoft Network Manager 3.4 is useful to watch the traffic between the WFE and the load balancer. WireShark is also good option. This role would probably best be performed by using Fiddler as a reverse proxy to capture the traffic (I never done this).

SharePoint 2013 has the Request Management Service that acts like a load balancer for traffic. I don't understand the point and I would need a rather strange scenario to use Request Management if I have a decent load balancer in place (KEMP or F5).

Updated 17 Aug 2015: All the Load balancer solutions (F5, Cisco, Kemp etc.) have traffic distribution, it is a good idea to use a more advanced algorithm. For instance using an F5, setting to use the "Dynamic Ratio" algorithm redirects traffic based on continuous monitoring of the servers resources. F5 has many options I prefer using the "Dynamic Ratio" but it depends on the circumstances.